An Original Haden Resource
Deep Listening
A five-day practice framework to help us return to the never-ending work of learning to listen.
Hearing happens to us. Listening is something we choose, and practice, and keep learning. This free guide offers five days of practice, about twenty minutes each, moving outward to the room, the world, and another person, then inward to the body and what it has to say. Enter your details below to download it.
A gift for the quieter season
We could say that hearing happens to us.
Our ears have been working to take in the sounds of the world since before we were fully born into it. But listening is something we have to choose; we have to learn and practice. And of course, most of us were never taught how. Add in the exponential increase in noise around us — and in us — and listening becomes a practice we have to keep learning, keep adapting.
Whether you’re a long-time member of the Haden Institute community, or just meeting us for the first time, all you need is a journal, a timer and twenty unhurried minutes a day. Bring your willingness to be surprised.
Where this comes from
A practice of attention, borrowed with gratitude.
The distinction at the heart of this guide — between hearing and listening — and the phrase deep listening itself come to us from the composer Pauline Oliveros, who spent her life teaching people to attend to sound as a spiritual discipline.
The five days draw on a handful of teachers. Day One borrows its length from John Cage’s 4′33″. Day Three draws on the Quaker clearness committee and Margaret Guenther’s Holy Listening. Days Four and Five adapt Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, the practice of listening to what he called the felt sense — a bodily knowing that comes before words. The guide closes with notes on where to go further with each.
Five days
Outward, then inward.
Take one a day for five days (or one a week for five weeks).
The Room. Returning to our practice. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of sitting exactly where you are, and noticing there was never any silence there to begin with.
The World. Name each sound, then let it go. A walk without a phone or a destination, longer than feels necessary.
Another Person. Distilling our listening. Twenty minutes of listening to someone without fixing, advising, or reassuring, and counting to five before you speak.
The Body. Let the body speak. A short form of Focusing: make room, choose one thing, find a word for it, and let the body judge the fit.
The Asking. Ask, and then wait. Returning to yesterday’s felt sense with a question, and staying, unoccupied, for whatever answers.
How it asks to be used
Not only in your head.
Each day is built around something you do — sit with a timer, walk, keep company with a friend, attend to a place in your body — and only afterward something you write. The practice happens in the listening; the journal just keeps the record.
The guide is a ten-page landscape PDF, made for printing or reading on screen. Go slowly. If more surfaces than you expected, it is a sign to bring it to a spiritual director, a therapist, or a trusted friend rather than to press further alone.
Who this is for
For those who listen for a living, and those who are just beginning to.
Spiritual directors, dream workers, clergy, and therapists will recognize this territory; deep listening is the ground of their work. But no training is required. If the noise around you, or in you, has grown loud lately, this is for you too.
Deep Listening
Listening is a practice you can begin alone.
But it’s not a practice we can complete alone. When you finish the five days, underline the one sentence that surprised you, and take it to someone.
Download the practiceFree, and yours to share.